John Lennon's solo catalog makes its debut on iTunes

Apple said Tuesday that the solo catalog of former Beatles frontman John Lennon is now available for purchase and download via its ubiquitous iTunes Store.

The move comes nearly two years after the Lennon's solo work was made available for download from several rival services, such as Real/Rhapsody, Napster, MSN and Yahoo! Unlimited.

Starting Tuesday, sixteen of Lennon's solo works from EMI Music are available for the first time on iTunes, with the "Lennon Legend" and "Acoustic" collections making their worldwide digital debuts.

For a limited period of 30 days, exclusive video content will be included with the albums "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band," "Sometime in New York City," "Walls and Bridges," "Milk and Honey" and the collections "Anthology" and "Working Class Hero."

"John would have loved the fact that his music will now be available in a format suited to a new generation of listeners," said Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow.

As part of EMI Musics digital catalog, Lennon's solo works will also be available in iTunes Plus, offering DRM-free music tracks with high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordingsfor just $1.29 per song.

"John Lennon is one of the greatest artists of our time," said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs. "Were thrilled to have his solo catalog available on the iTunes Store for the first time."

Apple's iTunes Store currently features the worlds largest catalog with over five million songs, 550 television shows and over 500 movies. To date its combined to sell over three billion songs, 50 million TV shows and over two million movies.

Olivia Harrison, the widow of Beatle's guitarist George Harrison, recently told Reuters to expect the entire music catalogs of the Beatles to turn up on music stores like Apple iTunes later this year or early next.